CHESTER – Vincent G. Dowling, who had a decades-long association with Ireland’s national theater company, performed three times at the White House and was the artistic director for the Great Lakes Theater Festival and founder of the Miniature Theatre of Chester, died Friday at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 83.

Dowling, who left school in Dublin at age 16 to become an actor, was a poet, playwright, author, director and raconteur whose work at what was then the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival had a profound impact on a then 20-year-old unknown actor named Tom Hanks when Dowling invited him to the Ohio stage company in 1977. He had directed Hanks one year earlier in California.

"Vincent's the reason I'm an actor, man," Hanks would say years later. "To act with Vincent on the stage is to share the wings with a master."

Dowling was a star in his own right, performing on stages from Moscow to Hong Kong to Washington, D.C., and, finally, in his adopted home of Chester, a tiny hamlet in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains.

"My reality was in who could I pretend to be," Dowling said. "Acting is to experience everything in God and the devil in yourself on stage."

During his 27 hears at the national theater of Ireland, The Abbey Theatre, he was artistic director, director of experimental theatre and a leading company actor. He organized The Abbey's first visit to The Moscow Arts Theatre and brought the famous Russian theatre to Dublin.

Dowling also played and directed in the United States, London, Paris, Florence, and the Edinburgh Festival.

In his native Ireland, he was a well-known radio and television broadcaster. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1976.

At Great Lakes, Dowling was producing artistic director from 1976-84. There he staged, among others, the “Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,” an 81/2-hour, 40-actor production .

Although he described himself as a committed Democrat, he performed solo on three state occasions at the White House during the Reagan years.

He won an Emmy Award for his PBS television production and direction of "The Playboy of the Western World." His oldest daughter, Bairbre Dowling, was a member of the cast.

In the early 1990s, he founded The Miniature Theatre of Chester, a professional theatre now in its 20th season. He resigned from MTC in 1997 and formed the Vincent Dowling Theatre Company,

Dowling’s reputation attracted Academy Award winner Kim Hunter, Dan O’Herlihy, David Birney, Ireland’s David Kelly and a long list of other actors to the stage in Chester.

Two years ago, he brought Norman Corwin’s play about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, “The Rivalry,” to audiences in Boston and New York.

Asked once if he was retired, he replied no. “Old actors don't retire, they only get less work," he said.

Besides his wife Olwen, an artist, Dowling is survived by children Bairbre, Louise, Valerie, Rachael and Cian. He leaves seven grandchildren.

The memorial service is private

In lieu of flowers donations may be made to The Actors Fund , 729 7th Ave., 10 floor, New York New York 10019. The fund may be reached at (212)221-7300